Pinkett Smith plays Christina Hawthorne, a compassionate and headstrong Chief Nursing Officer heading up a group of dedicated nurses at Richmond Trinity Hospital who spend long days and nights on the hospital's front lines. Hawthorne is the kind of nurse you want on your side when you or someone you love is in the hospital. She is the kind of nurse who fights for her patients and doesn't let them slip through the cracks. When necessary, she takes on doctors and administrators who are overworked, distracted or just unable to see the human being behind the hospital chart.

Whether showing humanity to a homeless woman, trying to talk a suicidal cancer patient off a ledge or exposing a doctor's near-fatal error, Hawthorne will do everything in her power to help her patients. When a patient's care is at risk, she doesn't hesitate to violate protocol, defend her staff or stand up to administrators who seem to have forgotten a hospital's true purpose.

But the long days at the hospital and Hawthorne's intense focus on helping others take a toll on her personal life. Christina is recently widowed - her husband died one year ago after a battle with cancer, leaving her to raise a smart, rebellious teen-age daughter on her own. Hawthorne is still coming to terms with losing her husband, finding a way to balance her career with her equally important role as a single parent, and finding the time to take care of someone who always seems to fall through the cracks - herself.